Carolyn Forché

Occasionally you can attend a reading that is path-altering. I had the chance to hear Ms. Forche read a couple of times in the 80s. Students were talking about and sharing poems from her collection The Country Between Us, and her anthology of Poetry of Witness - Against Forgetting was still to come.

Forche spoke of a necessary space between the personal and political where witness poetry emerged – a space made necessary because of the too-narrow definitions that existed. That, in a time when young writers tended toward labels - political or confessional or romantic maybe - helped break the illusion that lives could be so compartmentalized.

The poems in her latest collection ‘In the Lateness of the World’ emerge out of this social realm but not without taking a hard look at Western minds that still want to keep lives wracked by war, and our unsavory histories, out of our mind’s eye. The poet shines a light migrations and crossings, and the harm and illusion of insulating ones' self whether in Asia, Central America, Detroit or on the Greek Isles where an overwhelming number of refugees pass. Her work alludes to earliest depictions of war in Western literature, a feeling of intergenerational trauma that overcomes our best efforts to shut it off.

In her poem 'Charmolypi,' this grief descends across generations, an “ache in the cage of breath” or a “light sound of wings brushing the walls” (57), being something brought down from Parnassus by Clio the Muse of History, a feeling that catches us unaware as if all the collective loss across generations were still present. The poem exists both as an acknowledgment of public grief but perhaps also as a rebuke for trying to distance ourselves.

There seem to be at least two certainties about the desire to wall ourselves off – its futility and our repeated efforts to do it.

In ‘Transport,’ Forche provides the reader with a catalog of ways to travel through this ancient land from rickshaws, to oxcarts, to taxis and small trucks. The speaker relates a set of instructions, saying that if the driver ‘struck/a man on foot we should run away before the car / is torched by the crowd and the driver killed.’ The idea of being a bystander collapses and the visions of burning cars invades the speaker’s dreams. Her poem is an answer to the idea of viewing the world from a mythical place of safety – which doesn’t exist. Our likelihood of doing harm diminishes as we stop trying to insulate ourselves – when we ‘go on foot’ (68).

Insulating creates a world surrounded by treachery, an area outside the light’s radius that is cause for fear. This is not the world of the poet whose proper work is to illuminate. Work that demands living like ‘the lensmaker who died / with his lungs full of glass’ or the ‘yew in blossom when the bees swarm’ becoming ‘their amber cathedral.’ The cost of this, like the case of the lensmaker, may be fatal but perhaps the reward ‘Nothing/to be afraid’ is greater. (13).

Forche, who has introduced so many newer readers to poets of witness such as Lorca and Mandelstam, has devoted much of her poetic life to this idea of illumination and implied the danger of writing from behind barriers. The images here put us in the scenes of atrocity, seeing many of them emerging from history, with Forche acting as our guide saying 'I will get you there' (6).
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